Microstyle everywhere. Even on cheese.

It always cheers me up to see small, well crafted messages in unexpected places. Like on the little signs stuck into hunks of cheese, for example. The folks at the Calf and Kid, a sort of Pacific Northwest cheese boutique in Seattle’s Melrose Market, go the extra mile to make their descriptive signage entertaining. Click on the image above to get the larger version, and you’ll see that the sign in the middle says “This aged beauty will make you want to date a cougar of your own.” OK, a little hokey maybe, but it made me laugh. The other signs are like that, too. I spent a few minutes just reading them for fun, even though I had no intention of buying the pricey cheese with my two little hungry cheese monkeys, aged six and three, in tow.

Linguistics & language resources

Toolkit

Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little is a book by Christopher Johnson, aka The Name Inspector. It's a field guide for the age of the incredible shrinking message, coming this summer from W.W. Norton & Company.